Loetzinn
by xahra99
Summary: Or, One Hundred And One Things To Do In Prison. Basch. Gen. Warning: exceedingly low angst content. May contain nuts.


Loetzinn.

(Or, One Hundred And One Things To Do In Prison)

"Basch?"

Basch didn't hear Vaan at first. He was hunkered down in the dunes, methodically cleaning hyena blood from his jerkin with handfuls of sand. They were halfway through the Dalmascan Estersand at the time, resting before making the last push for the city. It was hot. He was tired.

"Basch?"

Balthier spoke without turning his head, or, indeed, opening his eyes. " Man doesn't want to talk, Vaan. You've got to respect that."

"I don't mind." said Basch. The kid had been jumpy all day; running his mouth off about nothing and hacking through Wolves and the odd Giza rabbit with all the aptitude of a legless Chocobo. Basch would have put his behaviour down to first-battle nerves if it hadn't been for his brother. And if _that_ was still bothering him, then the sooner he got it off his chest, the better.

"Suit yourself." The sky pirate gestured with a flash of lace cuffs and dyed bone rings. "Means he leaves me alone."

"What did you want?" Basch asked. He looked up at Vaan just in time to catch the _I'm deeply hurt and wounded _look that the Dalmascan gave Balthier in reply. Balthier, who still had his eyes closed, missed it completely.

The knight had expected another interrogation along the lines of _'so what exactly happened to my brother, anyway?'_', but Vaan proved him wrong

"I was just wondering..."

"Yes?"

"You were really in that cage for two years?

"Yes. Well, not in the cage, exactly. There was a cell. That was just for..special occasions."

Vaan thudded down in the sand beside Basch, loosening a few stray petals from the flowering neem tree above their heads. "What did you do all that time?"

Basch shrugged. He wondered if the boy really wanted an honest answer, or if he was just making conversation. "Mostly, I slept."

"You slept?"

"And waited." Basch pointed out.

"Waited." Vaan sounded obscurely disappointed. "You didn't wonder about what you left behind?"

"No point." said Basch briefly.

"What did you do all day?"

Basch shrugged again and leant back in the dunes. He brushed a falling neem petal from his forehead, and picked another one from his hair; where it stuck. Sand slid down inside his leather jerkin. The previous owner of the garment had been a larger man than the knight, allowing the sand plenty of space. He shifted to dislodge the sand.

What had he done all day? Now there was a question.

Every morning had begun, like most people's (maybe not so much like Vaan's, given his stained sash and verdigrised turquoise jewellery) with personal hygiene. The prison had been clean as jails went-the Archadians would tolerate nothing less-but the combination of a lack of running water, ancient crumbling stonework and a large number of prisoners with varying levels of cleanliness invariably led to prison lice. And the less said -or not said- about _them_, the better.

Next, exercise. He found that moving with chains got easier after the first six months.

That took most of the morning.

The long, dark afternoons had been considerably more of a problem. As was timekeeping; although Basch could always tell when it was afternoon by the faint scent of bhujerba-weed cigarillos as the guards knocked off for their break. It would have been a perfect time to escape if he hadn't been unarmed and chained hand and foot, but he tried not to think about that. In fact, he tried not to think about a lot of things; most being objects he missed. His brother, for example. King Raminas. After that came Rabanastre, women, Azelas, decent food, the Knights of Dalmasca,and how abysmally stupid he had been to get captured. In no particular order.

His afternoons had been made rather more tolerable early in his first year of imprisonment; when a careless guard had dropped a piece of charcoal pencil in such a way that it rolled under Basch's cell door. The guards used the grimy stubs to mark individual cells with information; punishment details, food withholding orders, and days until execution. Basch had used his to escape.

Not from the dungeons; Basch had establised quite early in his imprisonment that this was next to impossible. He had reviewed all areas of tactical military importance in his role as Captain of the Order before Nalbina fell. The best and only way to escape from the citadel was to avoid being incarcerated there in the first place. Owing to Basch's present situation, this was not really an option. So he used the charcoal, and he used what he could to escape inside his own mind.

He'd started off with maps.

At first he was careful to sketch only on the small patch of cell wall underneath his door, in faint dark lines that any passing guard would overlook. Later, he grew bolder, though he always remembered to erase his work between sessions. No point trusting to luck, when his had so spectacularly failed.

He began with lost, fallen, Landis. Not the Landis of today, swallowed whole by Archadia twenty-one years ago; but the Landis of his childhood. Basch was an indifferent artist at best, and the maps resembled military plans when they resembled anything at all, but they kept his mind off things.

They always started in the same way, with the Ronsenburg.

The mountain first, saddle-backed and snow-topped, each tree, stream and rock drawn with exacating detail from childhood memory. The small town at its foot; named after the mountain. The capital city; the university towns, books burned and people scattered. The canals, piled high with bodies. The military academy (this in as much detail as the mountain) where he and his brother had spent most of his childhood. The fine detail petered out as he sketched the border country and the high forests, copying particulars he had memorised from military dispatches or obsolete atlases. Dalmasca, next, overlapping in the limited space so that her packed streets and wild sand-sea deserts nestled next to alpine pastures and rocky crags.

Once he had finished with the maps Basch copied what he could remember of his textbooks onto the stone. He wore the pencil down to a fat stub and then a crumb which grazed his fingertips as he wrote. He spent days puzzling over a sketch of the points of a chocobo; annotating wattles, keels and grommets in careful dark lines. The rough stone picked up the charcoal indifferently, but in his mind the images were always crystal-clear.

When the chalk ran out he sang all the songs he knew under his breath, several hours at a time in a husky prison voice. First the regimental tunes, then the parade songs, then the marching tunes and drinking songs. Old favourites like The Girl I Left Behind Me' or 'I Wish I'd Never Kissed Her.' The fortieth verse of 'The Skyship Venus' held his attention for a full three hours; as he racked his brain to recall whether the verse about the captain's daughter and the eel came before the stanza featuring the the ill-fated ship's dog, or after.

He never did get to the bottom of that one.

"Basch?"

Basch opened his eyes and realised that the kid was leaning over him,waiting for an answer. "I tried to keep busy." He wondered if the boy really expected an honest answer. A more mature person, such as the rest of their party, would never have brought the subject up in the first place. A more intuitive or experienced person would have dropped the subject, but Vaan was as callow as they came.

"How?"

"Training."

"In _chains_?"

"It's not impossible."

And he had. He had trained; played jacks with the knucklebones of a slightly more luckless prisoner; counted stones in the walls; repeated the names of the complete Dalmascan succession; picked lice from the folds of his shirt; measured the growth of his hair and beard; and waited. Survived.

At the time, he hadn't had a clue what he'd been surviving for. Now, as he he lay in the sand with a dead man's sword at his side; he knew that he had been surviving for this. for freedom. For time.

There was a resistance. He would find it, or it would find him. Through them, he could find the princess, and with some luck he'd be able to help rebuild the kingdom which he had been accused of betraying. Without it-well, it would be quick, which was more then he could say for the Archadian's methods of justice.

"Basch?"

Basch slitted one eye open and looked up at Vaan. "Mmm?"

"Why didn't you go mad?" Vaan said bluntly. "I mean, with nobody to talk to? For two straight years? I'd go crazy."

Basch made a point of not mentioning that the boy would undoubtedly go insane if locked away from human company for more then two hours. " I managed."

"What'll you do now?"

Basch could have answered him a hundred times over. _Eat_, he thought. _Rest. Fight. Join the Resistance. Revenge my country. Revenge my brother. Revenge your brother, come to that. Mourn the men that died two years ago in the Highhall of Nalbina. Find Princess Ashe. _

_But first_, he thought, _I'm going to get out of this damned codpiece_.

* * *

Author's Note. This story was named after a short film available at I remembered the name translating as 'Tin Soldier' in German which seemed appropriate. However, the film notes said that originally the name was a mistake ( 'Tin Soldier' translates as 'Zinnsoldat') and that 'Loetzinn' translated as 'Tin Solder.' The film makers liked and kept the name, and I decided to do the same. After all, isn't solder made for holding things together?

This story's for Basch, surely the least angst-filled Final Fantasy prisoner ever.

NB: This fic was written just before the party duels Judge Ghis, in the game. I'm assuming that subsequent events in the game do not reveal that Basch spent the whole two years moonlighting as a go-go dancer in Archadia, for example. Any mistakes are completely down to me.

All characters are the property of Square Enix. Warning: extremely low angst content. May contain nuts. No actual Square Enix characters were harmed in the production of this work.


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